google analytics

We all know about the highly publicized attribution modelling tool, remarketing, viz flow and social media tracking but what about some of the more soft-spoken updates to Google Analytics that have taken place the last 10 months. Well, at GAUGE Boston Justin Cutroni highlighted some of the lesser-known (but awesome) Google Analytics updates. We’re taking a few minutes here to highlight the best unknown Google Analytics updates for 2012.
Google Analytics Report Automation (Magic)
Using a simple script, provided by Justin and the Google Team you can easily get data from Google Analytics into Google Spreadsheets ...

Introducing Google Tag Manager
Today at eMetrics Boston, Laura Holmes of Google stunned the audience with the release of Google Tag Manager, a platform enabling marketers to manage measurement and conversion tags through a user-friendly, self-serve interface. With Google Tag Manager (GTM), you can deploy new tags or modify existing tag placements with a few clicks, taking what ...

Ready for some great news to help lead you into the weekend? Early Bird Savings for GAUGE! If you register today, you can still receive these fantastic savings leading up GAUGE Boston (Google Analytics Users' Great Event).
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Let's face it: Google Analytics' documentation contains a lot of examples that work very well for simple use-cases, but advanced configurations require planning and attention to detail, and copying-and-pasting sometimes introduces problems that can affect data accuracy.
Historically, the biggest problems we find stem from configuring multiple trackers - often because some third-party script (for user surveys, etc.) is trying to track their usage, but their trackers conflict with your own. Tracker conflicts almost always relate to their handling of cookies, which domains their being written to, and what value is used for the domain hash prefix. Recent changes to GA ...

The digital analytics industry is excellent at sharing information for the betterment of the community. This is often done through conferences, blogs, document integration, API hacks and more. If there are new ways to gather information, we share it.
Within this industry, Google Analytics has proven effective at providing powerful data to any user. One drawback with the ease and mass appeal is that reports are often relegated to the lowest common denominator. This is often enough for most users, but for the typical analyst or power-user, teasing out important data takes a few tricks. Power-users will create Custom Reports to ...

Recently we wrote about common pitfalls of redesigning and launching your website. There was one section in particular that incited some debate, which is expected because we only touched on the tip of the iceberg. And because of that, we were inspired to expand upon the concept of Designing in a Vacuum.
Sucks:
Designers are designers, not analysts
Clean Sweep:
It is true that there is a left brain, right brain battle at times, but they are not at odds. As with most things in life, there is a happy medium. The job of an analyst is to be able to fully interpret a ...

Redesigning and launching a new website is an exciting and stressful time. It can be a big undertaking to coordinate all of the moving parts to come together at a single day and time. To help ease the stress, we’ve compiled some common launch, design and SEO pitfalls that are often encountered, as well as tips to overcome these.
Launching Imperfection
First of all, expecting a site to be 100% complete on time is a bold expectation. It is always best to design and build the site in a development (or staging) environment first, and then transfer the files to the ...

Have you ever looked at your Google Analytics content (pages) reports and wanted to see details about the hostnames (website domains) where the pages are located? Then we've got something in common! This kind of reporting is a common request from clients and also a reporting technique I use all the time to do technical diagnostics, audits, and multi-site roll-up reporting. So, I recently created an uber Custom Report for the New Version of Google Analytics to do just this kind of analysis and thought I'd share it ...

When the numbers just don't add up, what can you do? The image at right illustrates this in a perfect way. Notice the two blue dots? Is one bigger or smaller? Look carefully.
The answer: it's all about perspective. I recently received an email from a reader that went like this:
For 8 years we've been using Urchin 6, provided by our web hosting company. Now that we've switched hosts, we started using Google Analytics, and instead of reporting 50,000 total "sessions" a month, we now see 10,000 total "visits" a month. ...